Crass Warfare

Raunch and ridicule on “Whitney” and “2 Broke Girls.”

She stoops to conquer: Whitney Cummings and Chris D’Elia as a battling couple on NBC’s “Whitney.”Credit Illustration by Jorge Arévalo

Whitney Cummings may be this year’s most unnerving success, having launched two network sitcoms, an unheard-of achievement for a newcomer. On “Whitney,” which airs on NBC, she stars as a version of herself; with Michael Patrick King, she’s the co-creator of “2 Broke Girls,” on CBS. In October, both shows were picked up for full seasons (though “Whitney” was recently shifted to a different night), and “2 Broke Girls” is a genuine ratings hit.

I wish I could feel good about this, because, in superficial ways, Cummings is everything I love. She’s a young female in a field dominated by middle-aged white guys. She’s a standup comic who writes her own jokes. With her tomboy glamour, she suggests a sensibility that echoes back to Rosalind Russell: the sardonic brunette, as incarnated more recently in Roseanne, Janeane Garofalo, Sarah Silverman, Sandra Bernhard, and Tina Fey. Alternately deadpan and lacerating, this persona risks alienating the audience, a quality that also happens to be the signature of male sitcom auteurs, including Larry David and Louis C.K. (If you aren’t alienating anyone, maybe your jokes don’t go far enough.)

Cummings has attracted lots of vitriol online, in part because she fits into another subset of female comedians: she’s this year’s sexy-girl hate magnet. Olivia Munn filled that role last year, and Chelsea Handler before her, and Silverman before her. These performers diverge widely—I adore Silverman and can take or leave Munn; Handler bugs me—but they share some traits. They’ve got dirty mouths and model-skinny looks. They get accused of sleeping their way to the top. With varying degrees of satirical intent, they play the slut card instead of the quirky card. It’s a tactic that can backfire (and repel women), but there’s an argument to be made for being threatening rather than “adorkable.”

The problem is that “Whitney” is a terrible show, though in ways that resonate with our culture’s debates about women and humor. Like so many comedians on TV, Cummings plays an off-brand version of herself, an acerbic photographer with a live-in boyfriend. She resists pressure to marry; she and her dude bicker over household habits; they party with friends at a local night club. But, while Cummings is lacerating and deadpan, her fictional avatar reminds me less of Roseanne, or even of Silverman, than of someone much older: Lucille Ball.

This may sound like blasphemy to anyone who loves Lucille Ball, the woman who pioneered the classic joke rhythms that Cummings so klutzily mimics. (“Whitney” is taped multi-camera style, with a live audience hooting and aww-ing.) Cummings has none of Ball’s shining charisma or her buzz of anarchy. Yet she does share Lucy’s rictus grin, her toddler-like foot-stamping tantrums, and especially her Hobbesian view of heterosexual relationships as a combat zone of pranks, bets, and manipulation from below. “This is war,” Whitney announces, before declaring yet another crazy scheme to undercut her boyfriend, and it might as well be the series’ catchphrase.

In Ball’s era, this was a depressing but subversive perspective: it was exciting simply to see a woman clown, even if she always lost, even if she was literally spanked for her rebellion. But, in the age of “Bridesmaids” and “Parks and Recreation,” “Whitney” ’s battle of the sexes feels off, airless—self-loathing disguised as self-assertion. It’s particularly unfortunate because, in theory, Cummings is a fascinating figure. In 2010, on the cult comic Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast, Cummings talked about her background as a twelve-year-old runaway, a teen model neglected by her dysfunctional family. Maron crassly noted that some might say that, as an attractive woman, Cummings should have nothing to complain about—or be funny about. “That you’re attractive!” she shot back. “And that your uncle tried to fuck you when you were ten.” “Whitney” was in development at the time, and Cummings talked about her desire to take risks with her routines (those polished bits, with their tactical, “Am I right, ladies?” punch lines), adding vulnerability and candor.

This promising vision falls flat on “Whitney.” Like Cummings, the fictional Whitney is scarred by her parents’ multiple divorces. She regards sex as a form of scorekeeping. From her boyfriend’s perspective, and from her own, Whitney is a buzzkill so fearful of abandonment that she’s at once cold and smothering, a neat trick. Occasionally, one of these routines hits pay dirt (as when Whitney role-plays a naughty nurse, then makes her boyfriend fill out insurance forms), but most of the time it feels as if Whitney had torn out every article in Cosmopolitan, chewed them up like a hamster, and built a nest. This is alienating, sure, but it’s also dank, a dead joke, from an older style of female comedy—I’ll say I’m ugly before you can.

In one episode, Whitney accuses her boyfriend (the hangdog Chris D’Elia, who plays a dot-com millionaire) of a thought crime: he has glanced at another girl. Because he won’t admit it, Whitney gives him the silent treatment, which upsets him until he realizes that he no longer needs to listen to her. When Whitney catches on, she decides that the best punishment is to talk endlessly: about whether she’s fat, about different shades of blue paint, about getting her period. She’s parodying and confirming sexist ideas all at once, which is pretty much the ethos of the series. (It reminds me of “Glee,” which likes to insult fat people and then sing songs about how wrong it is to bully them.)

Whitney’s friends talk like amateur sociobiologists. Men “are way too proud and stubborn to ever admit they’re wrong.” They fight, since “they used to kill each other for meat and women, but, you know, they’ve got nothing left now that you can get both things online.” Women are conniving and dull. The show feels startlingly retro and cruel next to the warm, effortless boy-girl gangs that dominate series like “Happy Endings,” “How I Met Your Mother,” and even the hilariously filthy “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” Yet in later episodes of “Whitney” the mood becomes less caustic (you can practically hear the network notes), which only makes things worse. Whitney’s boyfriend calls her his “best friend,” the audience awws, and the show, which has so little heart, loses even its cold, dark soul, as Whitney morphs from Lucy into Harriet, the patient and boring wife.

“2 Broke Girls” is a better show, maybe because there’s no Lucy in the mixture. Instead, Kat Dennings’s Max is a baby Roseanne, with a touch of Laverne. Like Roseanne, Max is a waitress who insults her customers, a poor girl who walls herself off with defeatist sarcasm. Beth Behrs plays Caroline, a spoiled heiress who becomes Max’s roommate and co-worker. Cut off from her trust fund (her dad was jailed for running a Ponzi scheme), Caroline seems helpless at first, but her entitlement turns out to be a kind of superpower—she believes that she and Max deserve a better life. The two launch a cupcake business. At the end of each episode, a number rolls up onscreen: the dollars they’ve saved toward their future.

On Twitter, a sitcom observer pointed out that the version of Whitney on “2 Broke Girls” would hate the version of Whitney on “Whitney,” and that’s accurate, and not just because one of them is in the ninety-nine per cent and the other is in the one per cent. “Whitney” ’s Whitney vibrates with prudish anxiety, and her darkest jokes are about how ugly sex is. (At one point, her boyfriend cajoles her to do a lap dance, knowing that she’s taping them on a hidden camera; she does a great stiff parody of one, disgustedly licking her finger and planting it on her nipple.) In contrast, Max is a kinky romantic. She gets turned on when her crush feeds her celery. She swoons over hipster abs, talks about orgasms, and—with clockwork shock—she also cracks approximately one rape joke per episode, in a way that suggests that she’s speaking from experience.

Many people are put off by these coarse gags, and it’s true that a lot of them fizzle. Yet they’re also the riskiest part of “2 Broke Girls.” Max seems like something new for network television, a defiantly sexual young woman who is not a slutty sidekick. She’s got the traumatic background that Cummings alluded to in her interview with Maron, but it’s not her defining characteristic: she has hidden creativity, plus a legitimately mordant sense of humor. This nasty sensibility can pay off, as when Max confronts a group of uptown suits chanting “Service! Service!” from their booth. “You heard your bro,” she zings one of the frat boys. “Service him.”

There’s plenty to dislike about “2 Broke Girls,” especially the ensemble, which is conceived in terms so racist it is less offensive than baffling. The girls’ Korean boss, Han (Bryce) Lee, talks funny, is short and sexless, and wants to be hip; the black cashier is played by Garrett Morris, who should sue for the limp gags he’s fed; and the horny Eastern European cook has punch lines such as “Once you go Ukraine, you will scream with sex-pain.” The setting is equally phony: Brooklyn subways do not look like something out of “The Warriors.” But there’s so much potential here it kills me—a deep female friendship, raw humor about class, and a show that puts young women’s sexuality dead center, rather than using it as visual spice, as in some cable series about bad-boy antiheroes.

“2 Broke Girls” could improve; sitcoms often start slow. Still, it’s hard to advise anybody to place a bet on Cummings. These days, the best network comedies are too good for viewers to grade newcomers on a curve, out of gratitude for a bit of representation, a slice of the power pie. And if some folks get mad at Cummings for taking up two slots? That’s not an unreasonable response. As Liz Lemon, on “30 Rock,” once put it, “Women are allowed to get angrier than men about double standards.” ♦